Intel Core i7 Mobile CPU (Clarksfield) Review

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Cinebench R10 and POV-Ray

Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It is very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

Cinebench R10

3D Rendering

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Three of the four comparison desktop CPUs outperformed the Core i7-920XM on the multi-threaded iteration of Cinebench R10; but the Core i7-920XM was faster than every single one of the comparison systems on the single-threaded version of the test. Once again this is direct result of the Core i7-920XM's ability to scale its processor speed up to 3.2GHz using Turbo Boost Technology.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is a top-notch open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'all-CPU' benchmarking tool on the test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

Our results with the POV-Ray benchmark nearly mirror those of Cinebench R10 above. The only notable difference is that on this benchmark, the 3.4GHz AMD Phenom II X4 965 edges out the Core i7-920XM for top honors on the single-threaded workload. As this test is very sensitive to raw CPU speed, it's not a complete surprise that the processor running at the highest speed was the one to put in the fastest single-threaded performance.